In India's western city of Mumbai, Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital has delivered 115 healthy babies in the past month from mothers with COVID-19. Three of these babies initially tested positive, but later tests have cleared them of the disease.

Moreover, BBC reports that two other infected pregnant women died at the hospital, including one who has died before giving birth.

Mumbai has now recorded 24,000 cases of infection and 840 deaths so far, making it the country's epicenter of COVID-19.

Infected Pregnant Women

Sion Hospital officials said that among the 115 babies, more than half of them were delivered through C-section, while the rest were natural births. Fifty-six of the babies were boys, and 59 were girls, whereas 22 of these infected mothers came from other hospitals. However, it is still unclear whether the majority of them contracted the disease at home, outdoors, or in a hospital ward.

Currently, sixty-five doctors and two dozens of nurses are taking care of these infected mothers in a 40-bed special ward, but with the surge of infections, the hospital is planning to add another 34 beds.

During the delivery, doctors, nurses, and anesthetists use protective gear to safely deliver the babies on half a dozen tables in three operating rooms.

The Head of Gynecology, Dr. Arun Nayak, said that most of the pregnant women who have tested positive had not shown any symptoms of the infection, although some of them have a fever and breathless. The hospital has already treated them and sent them home after giving birth.

The mothers are very anxious and kept telling the doctors that they might die but that the doctors should make sure their babies are healthy.

Before going home, the mothers stay in a special COVID-19 ward for a week after their delivery and are administered hydroxychloroquine. They are then quarantined for up to 10 days in a separate center where they breastfeed their babies while wearing facemasks.

Mother to Child Transmission of the Virus

This year, a Chinese newborn in Wuhan was diagnosed with the disease 30 hours after its birth. Then in March, the first known death of a child younger than a year infected with the virus in the United States was recorded. There are also reports of a six-week-old infant who died of complications related to COVID-19 in Connecticut. The most recent death of an infant happened just this month in Wales.

According to Dr. Adam Ratner, Director of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at New York University School of Medicine and Hassenfeld Children's Hospital at NYU Langone Health, the transmission of the virus from mother to child during pregnancy or at the time of birth is rare.

But there are also reports that the novel coronavirus is detected in the placental tissues and fetuses are dying while pregnant women have an acute infection, but he noted that it could also be for other reasons aside from the disease.

Furthermore, Dr. Ratner said that there are also some reports of antibody responses from the newborns that could be consistent with infection in the womb or during the delivery. This means that there is a possibility that the baby was infected while inside the womb.